Have you heard your first cuckoo of the spring yet?

According to a major UK bird charity, the British Trust for Ornithology, over the last 25 years the UK has lost over half the number of its Cuckoos.

Since 2011 the charity has been satellite-tracking Cuckoos to find out why. It has learned lots of vital information which could help us to understand the Cuckoo, about the routes they have taken, and some of the pressures they face while on migration.

It is believed that Climate change is causing the timings of the spring season to change and there is evidence that many migrant species are not advancing their arrival times with the earlier spring.

The Trust says that Cuckoos are doing better in some areas of the country than in others, with the decline in England at 63 per cent, being greater than in Scotland and Wales, but they wish to know why they are declining at the rate they are.

Keith Betton, chairman of Hampshire Ornithological Society said: “Last summer the Hampshire Ornithological Society sponsored the fitting of a satellite tracker to a male Cuckoo in the New Forest as part of a national monitoring scheme. We named him "Selborne" after the Hampshire village where Gilbert White, the famous Eighteenth century naturalist came from. Selborne has been in Africa all winter and started his return to Hampshire several weeks ago. He is now probably back in Hampshire today or tomorrow. We know his exact route because of the tracker.”

Keith added: “Our bird is the first to reach Europe, way ahead of the others.”

The BTO say that there is still more to discover. They would like to look more closely at how cuckoos are dependent on, and how much their migration is linked, to the drought-busting rains of the weather frontal system, as they move out of the Congo rainforest and begin to head back to the UK via West Africa.

To learn more about the cuckoo tracking project see the BTO website www.bto.org.